Always Italicise by Alice Te Punga Somerville

Author:Alice Te Punga Somerville
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Firsts

(for PACIS100 2018)

Whatever happens next, remember this:

you have been the first.

You didn’t plan to be the first; it just happened.

You signed on for twelve weeks of something

for some reason:

passion, ancestry, interest, timetabling.

People in our ocean have been the first for millennia:

the first to plant this,

the first to fish that,

the first to go there,

the first to see what you can do with that bark

once you take it from that tree.

You need someone to be first so that others can be second,

and third,

and fourth,

and all the way down

until there are so many that it feels

like the firsts had planned to be first:

that they knew what was to come.

But if you asked the firsts

they would say they were giving something a go,

trying something out,

solving a problem,

asking a question:

that it was a big risk, or a small coincidence.

And if you asked the firsts

they would say they’re not the first anyway:

they would point to the people and reasons and ideas and inheritance

and — yes, Epeli — the common people and gods:

all the other firsts that came before.

A decade or a hundred years from now

what traces will there be of these short weeks spent together?

Will anyone recall our discussions, our assignments, our names?

Whatever happens next, remember this:

this is our sea of small decisions, big risks and maybe even coincidences

that turned out to be history-making

to be vast

to be oceanic.

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